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Basic Information

If Folklore is said to be the stories and wisdom and traditions that arises out of a culture, then when such stories are invented by a modern author and passed off as authentic, it can be described as Fakelore.

The term was coined in 1950 by an American scholar named Richard M. Dorson, who applied it to characters such as Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan who were widely claimed to be characters of American folklore but who actually were created by later writers. Pecos Bill, for example, was invented by a writer named Edward J. O'Reilly in 1923. Paul Bunyan may have originated in tales told by loggers around the camp stove in the lumber camps around the Great Lakes, but many of the Paul Bunyan stories were written as part of a series of advertisements for the Red River Lumber Company.

On a certain level, one may ask if it even matters. After all, even authentic folklore had an author somewhere deep, back in its history. And authentic folklore is always being polished or modernized or bowdlerized or otherwise mangled for new purposes, a practice sometimes called folklorism. But what sets Fakelore apart from this is the pretense of authenticity; that this is not an invention of mine, but a tradition handed down for many generations.

Sometimes communities will concoct Fakelore to embellish their history, to boost their own uniqueness and to give the tourists something interesting to buy T-shirts of.

Sources

Game and Story Use

Let's be frank. Inventing Fakelore is the GM's bread and butter. Everything we use in our games is either fakelore we invented ourselves, or stuff we cribbed from other sources. Or both.

But Fakelore might become relevant in a game:

A local legend hints that there is a fabulous treasure hidden beneath an old wizard's castle in the hills; but how much of the legend is accurate, and how much is a tall tale to impress the tourists?

An NPC scholar is in the middle of an acrimonious debate with another scholar over a legend which one claims is a fraud. The PC's need the scholar to help with their quest, but to do so, they have to put up with his obsessive quarrel.

Where mythagos exist, fakelore can get you killed. Or save your life, depending on what you put into it.

Perhaps a real monster/threat/whatever is lurking in the area, but using the fake legend as camoflauge